On Reddit recently, someone asked what people thought about the idea of a sales combat game where victory depends only on your sales skills in things like negotiation, persuasion, and handling objections. Demonstrating these skills will give your character more powerful weapons and more attack powers in the game.
I replied with the following:
About 30 years ago, freshly returned from a Tom Hopkins 3-day sales training course, I would have been very enthusiastic about your idea.
Mr. Hopkins fully indoctrinated us with the belief that selling was all about tactics and manipulation of our prospects. Tactics that equated sales with military-oriented “win at all costs” mindset. Even lying was encouraged, as long as you got the appointment.
Winning through combat fits the thinking perfectly.
Combine that with the extraordinary levels of frustration and anger towards selling and my at-the-time assumption that it was my inadequate selling skills that needed major improvement.
Your war game concept would have been just what I thought I needed.
After all, I know my product is what they need, and I am the expert, and I know they will be much better off after they buy it.
I also know that if I don’t sell them now, then I won’t get paid my commission, so their failure to buy is keeping me from making a living.
And I want to get the accolades and recognition for being great at selling that others are getting.
Because I have been doing everything my manager said to do that would work if I just say the right things at exactly the right time.
THERE WAS ONE THING THOUGH…
Then I learned, sooner than later, fortunately, that sales can just as easily be a collaboration.
A mutually acceptable process towards doing business.
I discovered from someone who had studied over 300 top 1 percent salespeople over 40 years that real success in sales could happen without going to war.
That the people in my market, or any market, are not my enemy. They are not objects to be vanquished and defeated on some imagined battlefield.
The reason that prospects resist or appear to fight back is that they are feeling invaded and pressured. And that pressure and invasion is being intentionally created by a salesperson who is hell-bent on making them buy something they don’t want.
That may have been the way of selling 100 years ago, when the likes of Henry Ford believed selling was just another assembly line process. And prospects were just raw materials being turned into cars. However, times have changed.
What if selling, in a different way of thinking, could actually be a path to peace instead.
PS. To get the adrenaline rush of simulated combat and the feeling of a victory deserved, I took up paintball.